La Montée

Chapter I

Towering above the city, behind glass walls and shimmering steel, lived the Toppers, the elite who ruled from the clouds, drowning in wealth. Below them, hidden in the shadows of crumbling districts at the city’s edge, were the Lowers. To the Toppers, they were nothing but vermin, tools to exploit, and disposable hands to grease the gears of their empire. The slums stretched endlessly, suffocating under rusted pipes and flickering neon signs. Life was a fight for scraps. You were either born at the top, or you were born to serve

 	In the heart of Paris, where the air was thick with the smell of industry and the cries of the oppressed, there came a pest, a shadow that moved through the streets unnoticed, like so many others. His name was Vern. Tall and lean, his form was a stark contrast to the bloated figures of the Toppers who towered above him in the Utopia that casts a shadow over the city, New Paris. His auburn hair fell in ragged strands to his shoulders, and his eyes, black as the abyss and soulless, glinted with a bitterness that no amount of toil could quench. His skin was pale as winter’s first snow, a reminder of the life he was born to, the life of a Lower. Vern worked in a factory that towered over the shanty town, its chimneys almost touching the floor of New Paris, and churned out the shiny trinkets and gadgets that fed the insatiable hunger of the Toppers. He spent his days toiling in the shadow of their towering ambitions, earning enough to survive, but never enough to live. The machines hummed, their gears turning in a rhythm that was as unfeeling as the men and women who made them work. Every day, he walked the same grim path to and from the factory, passing billboards that mocked him with the perfect faces of the Toppers smiling, always smiling, their eyes gleaming with a cold, untouchable happiness. It was as if they were not merely above him in the sky but looked down with casual cruelty, as though his existence were nothing but a distant thought, a thing to be ignored.

 	Vern hated them, while the rest of his kind submitted, but like the rest of his kind, he knew the futility of such hatred. Alone, a single man had no hope against their wealth, no power to challenge their dominance. He was a cog in their machine, a speck of dust beneath their boots. Vern thought of changing that, of rising above the muck of his birth, a dream that seemed as distant as the stars. Still, in the corners of his mind, where anger and resentment grew like weeds, something stirred, something that could change everything. That too would come at a cost. 

 	Vern trudged home, his boots striking the wet cobblestones with the rhythm of a man beaten into routine. The billboards loomed overhead, their gleaming faces watching him with the quiet arrogance of the Toppers. Their smiles, perfect and cold, never wavered. But the faces above him meant nothing compared to the growing ache in his chest, the gnawing emptiness that came from being one of the forgotten. As he passed a narrow alley, a groan split the silence of the street. Vern’s heart skipped, and his instincts kicked in. Without thinking, he darted into the dark recess of the alley, his eyes searching. There, hunched over in the shadows, an old man knelt, blood spilling from his mouth as he hacked and wheezed in pain. His ragged clothes were soaked in filth, his face worn with the weight of years, but his eyes, those eyes, still burned with a fire that Vern could not explain.

 	"Sir, what happened? Are you all right?" Vern called, rushing to the man’s side.
The old man’s gnarled hand shot out to grab Vern’s wrist, his grip tighter than any frail body should have possessed.
 	"Boy, leave now. Before they spot you,” the man rasped, his voice low and urgent.

Vern stood frozen for a heartbeat, confusion swirling in his mind like a fog. He didn’t understand, but before he could ask more, the old man thrust a blood-soaked pamphlet into Vern’s chest. The paper was cold and slick with the crimson stain, and the words scrawled across it made no sense. “What is this?”

 	“Go, boy, quickly. They’re coming!” The man hissed, his eyes wide with panic.
Fear gripped Vern’s throat, and he didn’t question the man further. In a flash, he ducked behind a nearby trash heap, his heart pounding in his ears. The world seemed to slow as he pressed himself against the cold, rancid metal of the dumpster, watching the alley from a crack between two rusted planks. Then, the ground trembled. A beam of light sliced the air, descending from above like the finger of a vengeful god. Two figures appeared, tall and elegant, their clothing gleaming white and gold. They moved with an eerie synchronicity, their long silver hair gleaming like the moonlight, their faces as perfect as sculpted marble. Eyes as blue as the sky, but colder than winter’s breath. These Toppers didn't even compare to the billboards; their skin was white, and their veins bulged from their skin; they looked almost sickly. Vern’s blood ran cold. “Toppers.”

The Toppers didn’t speak. They didn’t need to. In one fluid motion, they reached beneath their robes and drew a weapon unlike anything Vern had ever seen. It was a sleek, cold, long barrel that hummed with an ominous power. Without hesitation, the man in front of him was struck down in a flash of fire and smoke, his body crumpling to the ground like a rag doll. Before Vern could even catch his breath, the Toppers vanished, the light from their beam fading as quickly as it had come, leaving only the silence of the alley behind. The old man, the blood, everything disappeared as if it had never been. The air smelled of burnt ozone and death. Vern remained hidden in the trash, the taste of fear thick on his tongue. He crawls from the depths of the tin coffin that should have been his death; the smell of hot copper coins melting over an open flame fills the air. The man's charred remains crumble into dust as a gust of air rushes into the alley. Vern’s knees almost buckle under the ever-growing weight of the sight. He managed to gather his courage and leave the alley. 

Chapter II

Vern ran through the streets, his breath coming in ragged gasps, the weight of fear pressing on his chest like a boulder. His mind raced as his feet pounded the cobblestones, each step echoing in the hollow pit of his stomach. The billboards loomed above, their smiling faces twisting into cruel sneers as they watched him. It was as though they were alive, and each glance felt like an icy hand pressing against his back, pushing him forward, toward a fate he couldn’t escape. Vern turned a corner and slid through a gap in the fence leading to his shantytown, tearing his already ragged shirt. The Lower city stretched out across Paris like a wound that New Paris refused to acknowledge. Miles of corrugated tin and salvaged metal leaned against each other in crooked rows, a labyrinth of rust and desperation stitched together by hands that had long stopped hoping for something better. From the gleaming platforms of above, where the glass towers caught the sun and threw it back in blinding arcs, the shanty town probably looked like nothing at all. A smudge. A stain that polite eyes had learned to skip over. As Vern entered the shantytown, he inhaled the familiar scent of iron and old rain. Water never drained properly down here; it pooled in the alleyways between shacks, brown and slick with oil runoff that seeped down from New Paris’s underbelly. Vern leapt over the exposed pipes that fed the upper city like veins, humming with clean water. 

 	Vern navigated through the maze of metal that they call home, stealing glances from the housewives sitting on their stoops waiting for a husband or son who is not certain to return. The shacks were built from whatever the Toppers discarded: advertising hoardings stripped of their glossy faces, car doors beaten flat and wired to fence posts. Nothing fit together properly. Gaps between the walls let the wind in, which came down cold from the superstructure overhead, carrying the scent of vanilla from the fields above. Every wall was a patchwork of different metals and different eras of garbage, and each piece carried its own shade of corrosion. Rust was the only colour the Lowers could call their own.

 	The deeper Vern went, the smaller the streets became. There were no streets, not really. Just the spaces left between the structures, narrow and winding, some barely wide enough for two people to pass without pressing their shoulders to the jagged walls. Tetanus was so common within the Lower city no one talked about it anymore. The ground was concrete in some places, the old cities' bones showing through, and implanted plastic in others, reinforced by generations of layering. Vern’s only guiding light was the jury-rigged connections that tapped illegally into the grid and bare bulbs that flickered and buzzed, sometimes even sparking fires that no one ever came to put out. A protruding bar caught Vern’s leg and planted him on his back. Above him, always above, was New Paris, floating on its engineered platform like a cathedral suspended over a graveyard. Its shadow fell over the Lowers for most of the day, a permanent twilight that blended the hours together. The Toppers had real sunlight each day; their air was filtered, and their walls were smooth and warm. They had gardens; Vern had heard about gardens, doubting such a wonder ever even existed or was it just a ploy to subordinate them further? 

 	Vern finally reached his shack, its walls made of quickly put-together scrap with rust covering the surface. He threw himself through the door, slamming it shut behind him with a force that shook the hinges. The plastic floor felt hard against his feet, and the cold metal walls mocked him with their creaks. His heart thudded in his chest as he bolted the lock and sank to the floor. His throat tightened, a bitter pain rising in him, and his eyes burned with the sting of unshed tears. It wasn’t just the fear; it was something deeper, a hollow ache he couldn’t name. Then, through the haze of his panic, he remembered the pamphlet. The paper, stained with the blood of the old man, was still clutched in his hand. He unfolded it with trembling fingers, his eyes devouring the words as though they were some forbidden fruit. The promises it held were like a dream from another world, a world where men like him were not crushed beneath the heel of those above. Equality. Justice. A world where those who worked the land, who built the cities, would finally control the fruits of their labour, where no man would feast while another starved. Where no one lived in excess at the expense of others' misery. At the end, the words burned into his mind: the people have power.

 	Vern had never heard such things. In his life, he had always been nothing: a dog on a short leash, a nameless worker, a shadow in the streets. Men like him were destined to serve, to toil without end, but these words, they sparked something in him, something fierce and untamed. The old man had spoken of dangers, of forces that would silence those who dared to dream. Vern knew the Toppers would see him dead before he ever found a way to change things. He looked around the room, the walls rusted and full of holes, the pantry as empty as his heart, the stained mattress lying on the floor like a bed of thorns. His home was nothing more than a cage, a reminder of the life he was born into, the life he thought would never change. Now, with the pamphlet in his hand, he allowed himself a fleeting thought, a fantasy of what could be. A life where he wasn’t looked down upon, a life where he stood as a man among equals. He lay awake long into the night, the sounds of the city’s distant murmurs drifting through the cracked window. He thought about the way things had always been, how he wanted the system to change but had simply accepted it, like everyone else. But now, the questions came in waves, crashing against his mind. And as the darkness pressed in around him, he wondered, what if there were another way?

Chapter III

The next day, Vern followed the directions from the pamphlet, the old shipyard straight into The Graveyard of Metal. Abandoned for decades, the rusting husks of ships lay scattered across the heart of the slums, a place the Toppers would never dare to enter. Vern wandered through the desolate wreckage until he spotted a red ship, its hull in better shape than the others. He crawled through a hole into its shadowed interior. A voice rang out in the dim light, full of bitterness.
 	"Why do we slave away for them?" it demanded. 
 	Vern moved toward it, finding an old man standing among a mass of people, too many to count, and flickering candles. 
 	"The Toppers feast while we fight for scraps," the man continued. "They lie to us to keep us in line!" 
 	The words struck Vern like a hammer. He had always wanted change but believed it was a fantasy. Now, he saw someone fighting for the fantasy he envisioned. The old man turned toward him. His hair was white as snow, his skin as pale as death, and his eyes a strange purple. He wore a black trench coat with red trimmings and a stitched rose at his heart.
 	"Got that green look of hope in your eye," the man said with a laugh.
  	"What?" Vern stammered.
 	"Name’s Henri. You?”
 	“Vern.” 
 	“Come with me. I’ll show you around."

 	Henri led him deeper into the belly of the red ship, past corridors where the metal walls sweated with condensation and the candlelight carved long shadows that swayed like drunken men. They descended a narrow staircase into what must have once been the engine room. Someone had dragged in a wooden table, its surface scarred with knife marks and cigarette burns, and around it sat half a dozen men and women with the same hollowed-out look that Vern saw in his own reflection. They looked up when Henri entered, and Vern noticed the way they straightened, the way the tension in the room shifted from wariness to something of almost like relief. 
 	“Sit,” Henri said, pulling out a chair for Vern. It was a small thing, but he appreciated the effort Henri made. Henri settled across the table, his violet eyes catching the candlelight like two bruises that refused to heal. “Tell me something: why did you come?”
 	“The pamphlet told-”
 	“Anyone can follow directions on a piece of paper. I am asking, why did you come?”
 	Vern felt the weight of the question settle on him. The other men around the table watched, not unkindly, but with the sharpness of people who had learned to judge fast. 
 	“I am angry. I watched them kill a Lower with no regard; they didn’t even react to the smell of copper in the air. We aren’t human to them; we’re cattle. I am angry because I’ve spent all my time since I could walk making shit for people who wouldn’t even spit on me if I burned. I’m tired of being worth less than the toys I make.”
 	Henri was quiet for a moment, looking at Vern intently. He leaned forward, placing his elbows on the table and raising his fist to the x-shaped scar on his chin. His voice dropped to not quite a whisper but felt like one. 
 	“Anger is fuel, Vern, but anger without direction just burns the one holding it. You claim to be tired of being nothing. Let me tell you what I see. I see a man who stopped in an alley when he sensed trouble, a man whose first instinct was to act. Most people would have kept walking or burned the pamphlet. You came here. That is not the instinct of a mindless drone; that is the act of someone with a spark of agency. You are something, and now that you’re here, that is everything.”
 	Vern didn’t know what to say. No one had ever spoken to him like that, as though he were a person worth speaking to carefully. Henri reached into his coat and pulled out a battered book, its spine cracked and its pages soft with handling. He set it down on the table between them. “Read this and come back to me only when you are done; I am sure you will have questions.” 
 	Vern picked it up; the title was stamped in faded gold: Les Discours. “I’m not much of a reader," Vern admitted. 
 	“Neither was I nor any of us here, but ideas don’t care if you read slowly. They wait for you. Take your time with it; the revolution isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.” He smiled; it was the first genuine warmth Vern had seen on the old man’s battered face, a crack in the worn marble that revealed something human beneath.    “Matteo will show you to your room; get comfortable.”
 	A large man with a red poncho and a gas mask stands on the left side of the table and motions for Vern to follow. They do not speak the whole way. He opens the door to a small metal box with a bed in the middle and a desk in the corner; there was no rust, and it felt warm. A feeling Vern had never really felt.  

Chapter IV

It had been a week since the meeting. Vern read part of the book, but the more he read, the angrier he became until it eventually resulted in him storming into Henri’s office. Vern slammed the book on Henri’s desk hard enough that the candle nearest Henri’s elbow guttered and nearly went out. “It’s useless. All these words are about the people, rights, and collective power. It’s a fairy tale. The Toppers have weapons that can turn a man to fucking ash. They have Enforcers. They have New Paris. What do we have? A beached ship and a stack of pamphlets.”

 	Henri didn’t flinch. He picked up the book, smoothed the cover with his palm as though it were a living thing that had been mishandled, and set it back down gently. “You finished it then?” 
 	“Enough to know it’s bullshit.”
 	“You are entitled to your own opinion, son, but tell me, what do you actually want? Not what the pamphlet promised. Not what I told you in the meeting. What does Vern want?” The honesty of the question caught him off guard. The anger, which had been so clear just a moment ago, suddenly felt shapeless. “I want them to suffer, to feel what I felt. They have birthdays, where their parents buy them gifts and give them cake. On my birthday every year, I toiled in their factories. I want to go up there and tear it all down, bringing their sorry asses down to the sludge-infested pit we call home.”
 	"Revenge, then, is not the justice we seek.”
 	“What’s the difference if the end result is the same?"
 	“Revenge ends when you’ve hurt them enough to feel satisfied. Except you never truly feel that; it never ends; it eats you up, whether it's guilt or an insatiable hunger for death. Once revenge takes hold, it is hard to escape. Justice ends when the systematic injustice ends, when we stand equal, not above, shoulder to shoulder with them.” Henri stood and walked to a porthole where the dim light of the Lowers filtered in, grey and thin. “I’ve known men who wanted revenge, Vern. Good men. Brave men. Every one of them ended up as cruel as the thing they were fighting. They replaced one boot on the neck with another. I won’t lead men who want dominance; I will lead men who want equality.”

 	Vern opened his mouth to argue, to shout, but something in Henri’s voice stopped him. There was a weight there, something alive and not theoretical, as if Henri were speaking about someone specific, someone that had crossed his mind. “So, we should just ask nicely?”

 	“No. We organize. We make them remember they need us more than we need them, and then we act. We act for something greater than our own individual grievance, a collective cause; we act for something, not against someone. That’s the only difference between a revolution and a riot.” He crossed back to the table and tapped the book. “Read it again. Slower this time. The parts that make you angry are the ones that matter the most.”

 	Vern stared at the book for a long moment. Then he picked it up and tucked it inside his coat without a word. Henri nodded, as though that small gesture answered a question he hadn’t asked aloud.

Chapter V

Vern finished the book in its entirety and still did not fully agree with Henri’s vision of justice, but he understood it more now. He was soon called to a meeting by Dante, the man who was responsible for the supply runs and stealing from corvettes aimed for New Paris. Vern’s heart was in his chest; it had been the first time he had been called to a meeting since he joined. When they entered the room, it was completely dark; the candles had been blown out and the lamps turned off. Dante was standing behind Vern and shoved him into the room; just then, the blinding light of the lamps filled Vern’s vision, and there was a mass uproar. 

 	“Happy birthday!” everyone chanted. Dante swung his arm around Vern.

 	“When you mentioned that you never had a birthday to Henri, he told us, we obviously had to make up for all those lost years.”

 	Vern felt his eyes well up with tears; everyone was there, all the friends he had made while on the ship and helping around. They threw confetti and ate cake that Dante stole. Vern had never tasted such a delightful treat, but it reminded him that this is a privilege to them but an everyday occurrence to the Toppers. Elaine’s eyes met Vern's, and she began to cross the room, her deep black hair swaying as she walked with a drink in one hand. An older woman, but she was never dismissive towards Vern like a lot of the other veterans. “Happy birthday ruster.”

 	“Thanks for this, Elaine. I want everyone to experience this someday, a birthday with cake.”

 	“Stop getting all sad, you big bitch; besides, it was Henri that organized it. Thank him.”
 	“You’re right. Where is he?”
 	“Go check the balcony; he has never been a fan of parties. Dante, however, gets carried away.”
 	Vern lets out a chuckle at that and begins to walk towards the balcony. He opens the door, and Henri is sitting on the edge of the red ship, his legs dangling over the edge where the hull had been torn open by decades of neglect. Below, the Graveyard of Metal stretched in every direction, a frozen sea of dead vessels. Above, the underside of New Paris glowed faintly, a ceiling of steel and light that never changed, never moved, and never acknowledged the world beneath it. Henri had a bottle in his hand, something clear and sharp-smelling that he poured into two tin cups. Vern sat next to Henri and gazed into the abyss. Henri handed him one of the tin cups. Vern took a drink. It burned and sat in his stomach like a hot coal. “Jesus, Henri, what is this?” he coughed.
 	“Your present. Homemade. Don’t ask from what. Happy belated birthday, son.”
 	"Thanks, skipper.” 
 	“I had a daughter once; she would’ve been around your age now.” The words came so suddenly that Vern thought he had misheard. Henri had never mentioned family. He had never mentioned anything about himself at all. He spoke in ideas, in systems and structures, rather than in flesh. 

 	“Her name was Anne. She worked in the water treatment plant, the one that feeds pipes running through the Lowers. She discovered the water we get is recycled waste from New Paris. Not filtered, barely treated. Just diverted. The Toppers drink clean water, and we drink what comes out the other end.” 
 	 Vern said nothing. He held his cup and watched Henri’s face in the dim light. 
 	“She reported it. Wrote letters and tried to get the word out. I warned her and warned her, but her sense of justice was far too strong. One morning she didn’t come home from her shift. I went to the plant. They told me she’d been reassigned. I went to the Enforcers. They told me there was no record of an Anne LaVenne ever working there. No record of her at all.” He took another swig of the bottle, clicking his lips as he swallowed. His voice did not break. That was what struck Vern most. It was flat and careful, as though he had told this story to himself so many times that the edges had worn smooth. 
 	“I looked for her for two years. Every contact, every favour, every bribe I could scrape together. Nothing. She was gone as cleanly as if she had never existed.” He turned the cup in his hands. “That was when I understood. This isn’t a system that makes mistakes. It’s a system that erases them.” 

 	Vern felt the hollow ache in his own chest tighten, the same ache he’d felt the night he first held the pamphlet. He thought of the old man in the alley, the way his body had crumbled to dust, the way the Toppers had vanished as though nothing had happened. He thought of his own life, how easily it could be wiped away. “I’m sorry.”

 	 “I am telling you this not to put a damper on your party; I want to teach you where misplaced justice and anger can get you. She died because she was careless; I loved her, but she was. The justice you seek will kill you, and I can’t lose another kid, son.” He said it without bitterness, almost gently, the way a father might say "be careful" to a child. Then he poured them both another drink, and Henri began telling old funny stories about his times in  the shantytown, Vern told him some of his. That night was the first night Vern had a drink; he was happy it was with the closest thing he ever had to a father. 

Chapter VI

 	"Tell me the plan again, Henri; I need to be sure I don’t miss a single detail." Vern said, his voice tinged with impatience. 
 	"Vern, you’re vital to this. If you feel anything is wrong, anything at all, you leave and contact Dante. Do you understand? The plan is simple. You’ll go back to your old job and make them aware of us. That’s all." Henri looked at him, his expression hardening with concern. Vern met Henri’s gaze, the gravity of the words sinking in. 

 	“Yes, sir, I'll see you on that day. Until then, be well.” Vern exited the shack where the meeting was held and headed through the shanty town, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, but he became aware of his own breath and how the clothes felt on his skin. Blending in was going to be difficult for him. He had contacted the factory's enforcer and said that he hadn’t been to work in the last couple of months because he had been working on a Topper transport, an excuse they would likely not question because those who worked on transports were randomly selected each month. When he entered the factory, it swallowed him the way it always had: noise first, then heat, then the smell of hot metal and machine oil that clung to the skin like a second layer of grime. The machines thundered in their rows, enormous press hammers rising and falling with a rhythm that shook the floor, stamping out the smooth casings and delicate components that would become the Toppers’ gadgets. Overhead conveyor belts carried half-finished products to the upper floors, where they would be polished and packaged and sent up to New Paris without so much as a fingerprint left on them. The workers moved in spaces between the machines like ghosts, their faces blank, their hands automatic. 

 	Vern took his place at his station, a metal-cutting bench near the eastern wall, and for the first hour he did nothing but work. He felt the weight of Henri’s mission in his coat pocket, where three pamphlets sat folded tight, their edges already soft from his handling. Henri believed that if we could convince two or three people to join, it would create a domino effect across the shanty towns over the course of a couple of weeks. Vern had read the pamphlets so many times on the walk over that the words blended into a single pulse; the people have power, but now, standing at his bench with machines screaming around him, the words felt absurd. These people didn’t look like they had power; they looked like they had given up long ago. 

 	He watched them through the morning. Marta, the woman at the bench beside his, had worked the line for twenty years, and her fingers were scarred white from hundreds of small cuts. Gael, the boy who swept the floor between shifts and slept in the stairwell because he had no shack to go home to. Dorin, the foreman’s assistant, who moved through the rows with a clipboard and a look of quiet exhaustion, marking down names and output numbers. These were the people he was supposed to ignite.

 	At the lunch bell, the workers filed into the canteen, a low-ceilinged room with steel tables bolted to the floor and a counter where thin soup was ladled into small bowls. Vern sat with his bowl and watched the room. People ate in silence or in small, murmured conversations that died when anyone walked too close. Trust was not a currency that circulated freely in the factory. Everyone knew that the Enforcers had informants on the floor, workers who traded whispers for extra rations. Vern ate his soup. He did not hand out a single pamphlet. He went back to his bench and worked until the end of his shift. 

 	That night, he sat on the floor of his shack, the coat Henri had given him wrapped around his shoulders, and felt like a coward. Henri had trusted him with one task, the simplest task, and he had done nothing. He unfolded one of the pamphlets and read it again. The people have power. He folded it back up and pressed it against his forehead, as though the words might seep through his skull and teach him how to be brave. 

Chapter VII

It took Vern three days to properly approach someone. He targeted Luc as he worked the night shift, where there were fewer Enforcers. He was a quiet man with careful hands and a face that gave nothing away. Vern had never spoken to him beyond the nod that workers exchanged when passing a shift change, the silent acknowledgment. One evening, arriving early for a meeting at the shipyard, Vern found Luc sitting outside the factory gates on an overturned crate, staring at something in his hands. It was a photograph, small and creased. 

 	Your family?” Vern asked, sitting down beside him. 

 	Luc hesitated, then showed him. A woman with dark hair and a smile that seemed to belong to a different world, and in her arms, a baby, barely a few months old, her face scrunched and red. 

 	“My wife Sabine and Elise, my daughter.” His voice carrying a softness that Vern had never heard from a man in the Lowers. “Elise has a cough. Has had it for weeks. My wife took her to the clinic, but they don’t have the medicine. It's out there, but only available above.”
 	“How old is she?”
 	“Four months.”
 	Vern sat with that for a moment. A four-month-old baby with a cough, a simple pill could fix, a pill that existed in the gleaming pharmacies of New Paris behind glass no Lower would ever touch. 

 	“What if I told you there were people who wanted to help you?” Vern asked. He didn’t reach for the pamphlet. He didn’t talk about the means of production or collective action. Instead, he talked about medicine. He talked about clean water and heating and the things a baby should have been given by right of being alive. Luc listened. He didn’t interrupt, didn’t argue, didn’t look away. When Vern finished, Luc folded the photograph and slipped it back into his pocket. “Where?”
 	“The old shipyard. The red ship. Tomorrow night.” 

 	Luc nodded once, the same silent nod of the shift change, and stood. He walked through the factory gates without looking back, and Vern watched him go, feeling something shift in his chest. It was not a triumph. It was a responsibility. He had asked a man with a sick daughter to risk everything on a promise. If the promise were broken, it would not be Vern who paid the highest price. He thought of Henri, of the way the old man carried the weight of Anne’s disappearance in every word he spoke. This is what leadership felt like: not the thrill of speech but the quiet terror that other people’s lives now rested on your choices. 

Chapter VIII

By the third week their cell had grown to nineteen, most of whom approached Vern themselves. They met in the boiler room beneath the factory’s southern wing, a space so hot that no Enforcer would willingly enter. The pipes overhead hissed with superheated steam, and the air was thick enough to chew. Sweat ran down their faces before anyone spoke a word. They were miserable, but they were safe, which had become synonymous in Vern’s mind. They stood in a loose circle: Luc, steady and watchful; and Rhea, who had proven herself the sharpest organiser, capable of remembering every shift pattern and weakness in the factory’s routine. The rest were faces that had become familiar over long nights: men and women with calloused hands and bruised eyes who had come to the movement not because they believed in theory but because they had nothing left to lose. Vern stood in the centre and spoke quietly, his voice pitched just above the hiss of the pipes. “The strike is in four days. Every one of you knows the plan. When the morning bell rings, we take the hammers and pipes and march onto the streets, refusing to work. No output means no new product going up to New Paris; they are bound to notice us as soon as production slows. Luc, you hit the Enforcer from behind as soon as the bell rings; he won’t expect it. 

 	“What about the other workers? There are two hundred people in here. We are only nineteen.” Rhea asked, her voice filled with worry.

 	“There are a lot of other members in other factories that will march out with us, and the remaining ones in here will join us as soon as they see it is possible.”

 	He saw the understanding move through the room, the way it shifted their posture and straightened their backs. They were not a mob. They were a mechanism, and for the first time they could see their power as a collective. After the meeting they filed out one by one, leaving by different exits, at staggered intervals, a habit they had learned after one of them had been questioned. Vern was the last to leave. He stood alone in the boiler room, the steam swirling around him, and allowed himself one moment of the thing Henri had warned him about, hope. Then he buttoned his coat, turned up the collar against the cold, and climbed the stairs back to the factory floor. 

Chapter IX

The day of the strike came like a storm, sudden and relentless. Snow fell upon the Lower city for the first time in decades. Factories fell silent as the workers left their machines untouched, a defiant refusal to feed the system any longer. In the streets, Lowers gathered like a tide, chanting slogans and waving red flags, symbols of the revolution that had begun to awaken. Vern stood at his brigade of nineteen's side, followed by other volunteers, his voice raw and hoarse from the shouting, surrounded by a sea of faces filled with both fear and hope. Thousands had come, a mere fraction of the Lower District, but enough to make the Toppers feel their presence, to remind them that they were not forgotten. The Toppers, caught unprepared for such defiance, sent their Enforcers with batons to crush the protests. They used nonlethal force, as they needed the Lowers to work for them. Henri knew this. Some Enforcers were still armed with pistols. The first wave came with tear gas, a cloud of choking smoke that stung the eyes and burned the lungs, but the Lowers held firm. They fought back with whatever they could find: bricks, stones, anything that could be thrown. They were outnumbered and outgunned, but the fury in their hearts burned brighter than the Enforcers’ weapons. For the first time, the Toppers saw the unbridled rage of the oppressed, the faces of those they had long ignored, now staring them down with fire in their eyes.

 	Vern found himself face-to-face with one of the Enforcers, a hulking figure in black armour. The man’s eyes were empty and cold and nothing but tools of the Toppers’ empire. They clashed, fists flying, the fight lasting longer than Vern would have liked. Then, just as his strength waned, the billboards above flickered to life. Henri’s face appeared dirty streaked with sweat, a far cry from the flawless faces of the Toppers that usually adorned those screens.

 	“My fellow Lowers, we have been trampled on for far too long. We deserve more than to feed off the Toppers’ scraps. We deserve equality. We deserve justice." The words rang out, each one sinking into the hearts of the gathered crowd. Henri’s image stared down from every screen, his face a stark contrast to the perfect, polished smiles of the Toppers that dominated the city.

 	“I come before you today not just to show you our willpower but to offer you a choice. Your first choice is to continue living as you are, serving the Toppers, living like dogs. Your second option is to stand on equal footing with the Toppers. Eat at their table. Drink from their wine.” The silence that followed was thick, heavy with uncertainty. No one knew how to respond, their minds racing with the gravity of what was being offered. The camera panned to Henri, his dirt-streaked face full of fire and eyes burning with conviction. Vern spotted Dante trying to push through the crowd, shouting something incoherent. 

 	“Begin your journey to equality,” Henri urged. A cheer rose from the crowd, wild and raw, a sound that echoed across the slums like the roar of a new dawn. Before the broadcast was cut, before the message could fully sink in, the cameras caught a final moment: Henri is standing tall, a smile on his face. An Enforcer appeared from behind, pistol raised, and pressed it to Henri’s temple. Henri didn’t flinch. He didn’t even blink.

 	“Thank you,” he said with a bright, defiant smile, the words a quiet victory in the face of certain death. Vern tore through the crowd, losing Dante on the way, his heart pounding, and found Henri sprawled in the snow, his body limp and lifeless. An Enforcer stood over him, the pistol in his hand still smoking, the cold air swirling around them like the whispers of ghosts. Henri’s pale face was streaked with blood, the snow falling gently on it as if to wash away his very existence. Vern’s breath caught in his throat. His mentor, the man who had sparked the fire of revolution in him, lay broken before him, as if he were no more than dirt.

 	Rage boiled up inside him. Without thinking, Vern grabbed a brick from the ground and swung it at the Enforcer’s helmet. The blow cracked the metal like a skull, revealing a boy younger than Vern, his eyes wide with fear. For a moment, they just stared at each other, two souls caught in a cruel twist of fate. Then Vern, his anger turning to emptiness, pulled away, no longer caring for the Enforcer. He dropped to his knees beside Henri, his mentor’s lifeless body cradled in his arms. The weight of the loss hit him like a stone. He sobbed, the sound raw and broken, a scream of grief that echoed in the stillness of the battlefield. As the tears blurred his vision, the billboards flickered to life once more. Vern, holding Henri’s body, was immortalized on every screen. The Enforcers and the Equalists alike watched in grim silence, the weight of the moment sinking in. Henri had planned this, all of it, even his own death. The spark of revolution had been lit, and now it burned in Vern’s heart like an unquenchable flame.